Making Mutt Fetch Your Email: Good Dog

If you’re like me, you fondly remember the days when email first appeared. We had found a new way to stay in touch with friends and to annoy colleagues.

And it was good.

Then text-based editors/clients came along to handle the growing deluge of messages from friends and annoying colleagues and we tapped our arrow keys and used those.

And it was good.

Now, of course, GUI clients, as well as broadband and smartphones, make it so simple to use web-based, html-heavy email that the simpler days of text-based email, even within the same organization or on the same server, are becoming a dim memory from the last century.

Fortunately, if you want to live in the past, technology allows you to do so.

Pine was first (for most of us), but most sources now say that that University of Washington product is too insecure to use and recommend against it.

Mutt works a lot like pine used to and is more flexible besides being more secure.

Now that gmail offers IMAP––which the mutt can do–there’s almost no reason not to give it a whirl.

If you’re on Linux, mutt is a breeze to install from the pertinent repositories; if you’re on OS X, here’s a great how-to; and if you’re on Windows . . . well, that’s not my fault.

So, turn back the clock to 1988 and let the mutt retrieve your mail.

And it will be good again.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 12:52 am and is filed under computers, Gmail, Mutt, OS X.
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